/*
 * ORACLE PROPRIETARY/CONFIDENTIAL. Use is subject to license terms.
 *
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/*
 *
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 * Copyright (c) 2004 World Wide Web Consortium,
 *
 * (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, European Research Consortium for
 * Informatics and Mathematics, Keio University). All Rights Reserved. This
 * work is distributed under the W3C(r) Software License [1] in the hope that
 * it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied
 * warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
 *
 * [1] http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Legal/2002/copyright-software-20021231
 */

package org.w3c.dom;

/**
 * <code>EntityReference</code> nodes may be used to represent an entity reference in the tree. Note
 * that character references and references to predefined entities are considered to be expanded by
 * the HTML or XML processor so that characters are represented by their Unicode equivalent rather
 * than by an entity reference. Moreover, the XML processor may completely expand references to
 * entities while building the <code>Document</code>, instead of providing
 * <code>EntityReference</code> nodes. If it does provide such nodes, then for an
 * <code>EntityReference</code> node that represents a reference to a known entity an
 * <code>Entity</code> exists, and the subtree of the <code>EntityReference</code> node is a copy of
 * the <code>Entity</code> node subtree. However, the latter may not be true when an entity contains
 * an unbound namespace prefix. In such a case, because the namespace prefix resolution depends on
 * where the entity reference is, the descendants of the <code>EntityReference</code> node may be
 * bound to different namespace URIs. When an <code>EntityReference</code> node represents a
 * reference to an unknown entity, the node has no children and its replacement value, when used by
 * <code>Attr.value</code> for example, is empty. <p>As for <code>Entity</code> nodes,
 * <code>EntityReference</code> nodes and all their descendants are readonly. <p ><b>Note:</b>
 * <code>EntityReference</code> nodes may cause element content and attribute value normalization
 * problems when, such as in XML 1.0 and XML Schema, the normalization is performed after entity
 * reference are expanded. <p>See also the <a href='http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/REC-DOM-Level-3-Core-20040407'>Document
 * Object Model (DOM) Level 3 Core Specification</a>.
 */
public interface EntityReference extends Node {

}
